by Rhys Ford
I avoided him, but theoretically he was kind of still my boss if the court needed me, and we also shared a couple of nieces who were products of his twisted sister’s depravity and my hopefully dead half brother. I didn’t have high hopes regarding Valin’s demise. He was like a cockroach—no matter how hard someone stomped on him, he always resurfaced.
“Yeah, a long bath sounds really good,” I muttered as I checked my link to see if I had any messages. The band on my wrist glowed in the upper left, but nothing was flashing red to alert me to an emergency or, worse, Ryder contacting me to see how I was doing. The truck rattled and moaned its way along the freeway, but it held steady and strong when I coasted it into the cul-de-sac of warehouses where I lived.
I wanted a place of my own where I could sleep unmolested by Dempsey’s earth-shattering snores, so I purchased the warehouse when he retired. It was furnished mostly from castoffs, but there were a few good pieces I’d gone out of my way to buy—a soft bed large enough to sleep ten if I needed it and an alarm system tight enough to electrocute anyone who tried to breach my defenses.
So I was surprised to find a woman leaning over the short wall that ran along the roof of my two-story warehouse. It was still early enough in the afternoon for the sun to cast her into silhouette, and after I threw the truck into Park, I reached for the Glock I’d recovered from the battle with our cuttlefish.
She knew me, or at least knew me well enough to throw her hands up so I could see she was unarmed. Then her lilting voice mocked me from where she stood on my roof.
“You can put the gun away, Kai,” Duffy called out to me as she put her hands on the wide cement runner I’d laid down over the brick perimeter. “Why don’t you go feed that damned cat of yours and come up here and have some of this preserved lemon with me. Because I can’t get these fucking mayonnaise jars open to save my life.”
DUFFY ALWAYS seemed ageless to me. I don’t know if I saw her through the romanticized eyes of my younger self—the gangly, awkward elfin Pinocchio she took in and made a man of—or if she simply was a breathtaking woman, confident and strong and with more than a little bit of attitude and an air of mystery about her.
She’d been the first woman I’d fallen in love with and the first one to tell me she would never be mine.
We’d met in the Red Lantern district, during a foolhardy excursion where Dempsey, in the time-honored tradition of all Stalkers and their apprentices, took me to get laid and to get my first tattoo. At some point he decided I was domesticated enough for polite company or at least hired company, told me to take a good scrub at my grimy body and put on my best clothes, and drove us down to get drunk at an exclusive understreet brothel.
The drunk part was easy, and so was the tattoo, an exquisite Japanese rendition of the dragon I’d taken down earlier that day.
It was the getting laid part that proved to be hard.
The wars between the elfin and the humans left a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and no matter how much money Dempsey had, no one would come near me. I didn’t know that at the time. I figured it out later. There were other Stalkers with us—not Jonas, because he probably would’ve pulled me out of there—and their conversation was hot, bright, and loud every time Dempsey returned to the table after he tried to chat up one of the workers.
“Don’t think there’s anybody here good enough for you, boy,” he growled, but there was something off in his tone. He also usually thought I wasn’t good for anything, so I couldn’t imagine me being too good for the glittering, pretty people working the floor. “We might want to try the other place down the street. They have prettier there.”
That’s exactly when Duffy walked into the room. And she was definitely too good for the likes of me.
She was gentle and seductive, and though she sensed I wanted to escape, she made me feel so comfortable I didn’t want to be anywhere else. We saw each other occasionally over the years and drifted from casual lovers to pretty decent friends. She’d left the brothel business and built up a steady clientele who clamored for her attention, but every once in a while, she took a walk down the streets, mostly to remind herself of where she came from.
But Duffy never came to my place without me being there, and she sure as hell hadn’t ever broken in and gotten up to the roof.
“You’ll have to tell me how you got up there,” I said to her as I walked through the front door with a container of raw cuttlefish and fought off my cat, Newt. “Either that or tell me how you bypassed the alarms.”
She sauntered down the staircase that led down from the loft, where I’d made my bedroom out of the built-in space I used for a garage. Her smile was as wicked as her walk, a swaying grin that kept her hips from being an erotic overload. On any other woman, a pair of jeans and a cinched red T-shirt would have been commonplace, but Duffy wore her garments as though she were stepping out onto starlight. Her long brown hair was loose and brushed the base of her spine, and a twinkle flashed in her dusky blue eyes when she leaned in to kiss my cheek.
I was very glad for the bath I’d taken at Jonas’s.
“I see your decorating tastes haven’t changed,” she purred as she walked past me to run her hand over the big-block engine that sat on a rack between the front door and the entrance to the garage. “Still haven’t found the car to put this in?”
“Not yet. I have hope.” I jerked my thumb toward the garage. “I’m still working on getting the Mustang back on the road. That run I did with Ryder beat the shit out of it.”
Sure, I was curious about why she was there, but no one rushed Duffy. She did things on her own time at her own pace. When she sat down on one of the three couches I’d placed in a U around a wooden chest, I almost warned her to not touch the disheveled cat when he stalked past her, but Newt simply leaped into her lap and began to purr, knead his little paws, and slit his eyes in sheer delight. The damned cat practically chewed my nose off to get fed every morning, and there the little bastard was, acting like a sweetheart.
“I love how he’s such a tiny thing,” Duffy murmured. She picked Newt up to hold him in front of her face. “Like he never made it past a half-grown kitten.”
“Yeah, if I did that, I wouldn’t have a face left.” I headed into the kitchen area beneath the second-floor half-level. “You want something cold to drink? I’ve got water, beer, and ice I’m going to put in a glass of whiskey. There might be some sweet tea. Dalia seems to think I’m a hummingbird and leaves that shit in the fridge for me to drink.”
“Or maybe she thinks you could use a little sweetening?” She gently put the cat down, and he trotted over to his dish and screamed his fool head off. Duffy coughed a little when I dumped half of the thinly sliced cuttlefish into his bowl. “Dear God, what the hell is that?”
“Some of the kill I got with Jonas this afternoon.” She wasn’t wrong. The stuff reeked, but Newt attacked it with a gusto I saw every time he came across something even remotely edible. I came back with a bottle of stout for her and a half-full glass of Jack for me. “Here you go. It’s supposed to taste like chocolate. I think it tastes like a five-day-old bagel covered in carob, but when someone gives you free beer—”
“You drink it and shut your mouth.” Duffy took the bottle and laughed in her smoky chuckle. “Dempsey taught you well.”
She’d come bare of makeup, and in the soft afternoon light through the warehouse’s high frosted windows, I could make out a spatter of barely there brown freckles across her nose and faint laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. If I looked hard enough, I might have found a stray strand of silver in her mink-brown curls, but her creamy golden skin and lush mouth were the same as that night in the brothel. Duffy caught me staring at her, and her smile brought up a hell of a lot of memories of sweaty, pleasurable times we’d shared.
“You don’t look much older than the first time I saw you in Mama Cheng’s place.” She curled her fingernails over my chin and then brushed her thumb against the pearl-black dragon scale my bod
y had absorbed on my last desert run. “And here I am, wearing every single one of my years and wondering how I ever was lucky enough to have someone as beautiful as the elfin boy sitting next to me.”
“Odin’s Birds, that’s a fucking lie. Dempsey dined out for months on you taking me upstairs,” I scoffed.
“Did you ever tell him I spent the whole time teaching you how to cheat at poker?” She took a sip of the stout, made a face, and then tipped the bottle back for another drink. “I mean, sure, we got around to doing the best of things, but I wasn’t too proud to take that man’s money back then.”
“Fuck no.” I grinned back at her. “But then, he still thinks you’re really a street-licensed prostitute.”
Duffy was one of the first secrets I’d kept from Dempsey and one I never regretted. Did she sleep with people for money? Yes. But it wasn’t that much different from what I did for a living. Duffy’s main coin was information and the influence she had on her powerful clientele. These days she spent a hell of a lot more time on the upper levels, stirring pots and taking names, but she always seemed to have a soft spot for the idiots she gathered along the way… specifically me.
“I am street licensed. Only a fool lets those things lapse. Never be too proud to do the work,” she sniffed at me. “But that’s not why I’ve come by. See, my little dragon, time’s come for me to call in all of those favors you’ve been racking up with me. I need you to take a message to someone for me, and you have to deliver it strong enough for him to listen very carefully and do what he’s told.”
I peered over my glass of whiskey at her, more than a bit confused. “Sounds like you want me to break someone’s legs for you.”
“Might come to that.” Duffy blew over the rim of her bottle and made it sing a soft, low whistle. “I need you to get that high lord of yours to do something, and baby, whatever it takes, you make sure Ryder understands I won’t take no for an answer.”
Three
PASSION AND eloquence rode Duffy’s words as she began to speak. She started off quietly, explaining how she got connected to a man with a big heart and an even bigger wallet, only to discover that every coin he’d gathered was covered in elfin blood. Her blue eyes couldn’t find a point in my face to fix on, and her gaze slid away from mine as she told me of the horrors he’d committed simply to put cash in the bank.
“In his mind, the war never ended. It’d been years since we found peace, but in Harvey’s head, he was still fighting something he could never win.” She crouched forward on the couch, perched nearly at the edge of the cushions, and I wondered if it was just in my mind that it looked like she was about to run. “Then one day we were at a dinner and I found out that, years before, he and his friends had gone down to the Tijuana River to hunt the Unsidhe as they fled the courts. It was a game for them. One weekend they tracked an Unsidhe woman coming through the scrub, and—”
I was right about the run. Duffy got up and on her feet and bolted for the bathroom, but she only made it as far as the kitchen. My kitchen sink had seen worse than a beautiful woman’s sick in its lifetime, and it probably would see worse still. I rubbed at her back as her body spasmed and lurched as it tried to get rid of somebody else’s sins. I stood there until she finished, and I stroked the hair off of her temple to let fresh air hit her face.
I turned on the water and whispered, “Why don’t you wash your face? And when you’re done with that, there’s a packet of toothbrushes under the bathroom sink. I’ll make you some tea. Okay?”
It seemed like she took forever, and I was about to worry, when the bathroom door opened and she came out, scrubbing at her mouth with one of the small towels Dalia insisted I buy for guests. Duffy was the first one to use it for what it was intended for. It spent most of its existence being pushed out of the way so I had a place to hang bath sheets.
“Sit down. I’ll bring you some tea.” I stepped carefully around Newt, who’d taken up pole dancing around my legs. Then I handed her the steaming mug and dropped a sleeve of chocolate chip cookies into her lap. “Cookies make everything feel better. I don’t know why, but they do. Chocolate makes me really happy inside. There’s something stupidly comforting about a really good cookie. Besides, these go really well with whiskey.”
“I slept with that man for five years,” Duffy confessed in a tiny broken voice that I hated to hear coming out of her. “How can you even look at me knowing I’ve shared a bed with a monster like that?”
My glass was half-empty, and I’d stupidly left the bottle in the kitchen. I took a long, burning sip, swallowed, and said, “Babe, I am literally the epitome of a monster. I shouldn’t exist. Tanic knitted me together out of magic, blood, and bone. I sleep with the monster every time I crawl into bed, so who the fuck am I to judge you?”
A silver gleam passed over her eyes, and their blue depths picked up a reflection of one of the Edison bulbs that hung above us. Her smile was sad as her fingers drifted back up to my face and as she traced over the shimmering hematite oval on my neck.
“It’s been years since I’ve seen him. Well, at parties and events we made small talk, but he acted as if we were strangers. I priced myself out of his reach, hoping he would get the hint, but I finally had to tell him I didn’t have time anymore. He’s powerful, someone I shouldn’t get on the bad side of, but my skin crawled every time I saw him. Then about six months after I extracted myself from his sphere, he was killed in one of those hunting expeditions.” Duffy took a long, shuddering breath. “His lawyers contacted me three weeks later to tell me he’d left me what was a small fortune because, as he told them, I made him laugh.
“So I took his money, and I used it to help any Unsidhe who came across the border to get to someplace safe. It’s not going to change what he did but….” She took a long gulp of the tea and then coughed. “Dear fucking God, what is in this? Ten pounds of sugar?”
“All I had was the iced sweet tea Dalia made for me,” I replied with a shrug. “I threw it in a pot and heated it up for you. Do you actually think I’m the kind of guy who would have tea bags?”
“God, I love you so much sometimes,” she laughed and combed her fingers through the ends of my hair. “And as much as I hate dragging you into this, things have gotten dangerous. Over the past eight years, I’ve paid for three Unsidhe to come across the border. They all headed to the interior, to a cluster of farms in the Midwest where they’re sympathetic to people running away from the Dusk Court. In about a week and a half, there’s going to be a young woman—a young Unsidhe—coming across. But she won’t be alone. If all goes well, she’ll be bringing children with her—three elfin children.”
The Dusk Court was known to kidnap the Sidhe, mostly for pleasure, but also to increase their numbers. An elfin birth was rare. Our long life spans and our bodies’ natural resistance to foreign growths hindered conception, especially for the Unsidhe. A fluke of genetic evolution allowed the elfin races to breed with one another, but the resulting offspring would only carry the DNA of one parent. A child was either Sidhe or Unsidhe, and the rival courts often went to war over the custody of a single infant.
I was the exception—a concoction of Tanic’s seed and the egg of a Sidhe mother I’d never met. I was a blend of both races, with genetic markers from each side. Ryder mistakenly believed I was of the Dawn Court when we first met. Then, after an encounter with a pack of ainmhi dubh, he thought I was Unsidhe. The truth came out a little while later. He questioned the color of my eyes, which are a deep purple, instead of the gold or silver of a Dusk Court elfin to go with my Unsidhe black hair.
It took him a bit to wrap his head around it, but as Ryder always did, he immediately began to think about how he could make my conception and its relative success help increase the elfin population.
“Three? She’s bringing three children? Pele, that’s….” My nieces were considered miracles, although most Sidhe thought they were as monstrous as I am. But I figured beggars couldn’t be choosers. For the elfin, children
were as precious as the damned dragons they worshipped. “Why do you need Ryder? Hell, I’ll go down there and grab her. Why involve the Dawn Court?”
“Because there’s a rumor someone is auctioning off spots on a small hunting party down at the border where the Unsidhe cross that weekend, just like that one Harvey threw before.” Duffy whispered, her voice shaky with fear and anger. “No one will tell me who’s pulling it together, but whoever it is has all of my contacts scared to death. I don’t have anyone else to help me… to help her get across safely.”
“Hell, I’ll do it—”
“I know you will, love.” She cut me off with a wry smile. “But don’t you see? I’m going to need Ryder to take them in, because no one else will. And then he has to stop these people from doing it again.”
THERE’S NOTHING like a crisp San Diego morning watching the sunrise come up over the ring of mountains to the east while I sip a cup of coffee and lounge on the rooftop of my warehouse on the shore.
Pity that wasn’t how I was spending my morning.
I’d spent the night uncomfortably as my body healed from the damage dealt to me by the cuttlefish—which hopefully by then was on a very slow, smoky journey to its final destination as peppered jerky. I’d dumped the rest of it into Newt’s bowl and taken yet another shower because I couldn’t seem to get the mollusk’s stink off of me… or maybe it was just what Duffy told me the night before that clung to my skin.
Either way, I was headed toward Balboa Park and the Southern Rise Court in my beat-up old truck and with a travel mug full of hot strong black coffee.
As the crow flew, it wasn’t much more than fifteen miles from my place to Balboa. According to old-timers and a lot of vintage maps, the distance had been much shorter before the Merge, but when our worlds collided, that part of San Diego tore apart and filled in with elfin forests and parts of an underground. The human population took advantage of its new tiered infrastructure, built out even farther and down to tunnel under the massive river where a major freeway artery once stood. There were still remains of old San Diego mingled in with the modern landscape, remnants of bygone neighborhoods tucked away between clusters of stacked boxy apartments and subway tunnels.